Recycling Is Not Just for Earth Day!

With the onset of the holidays, use this time to have minilessons about recycling and conservation. It's important to teach students about the concepts of conserving and reusing items on an ongoing basis, not just on Earth Day — although you'll find me spearheading an energy conservation night on April 22nd!

As the holidays approach, I try to make it a point in my class to reiterate the need for all of us to reduce, reuse, and recycle for our students. Here are a few ideas:

Reduce

Holiday packaging and parties make it a prime opportunity to teach students about sorting and reducing waste. For example, when having a party, have students donate a durable set of cups for students to reuse for the month of celebrations. Then, during party time parents can donate a gallon of juice rather than send in a box of juice boxes or pouches. This shows students how they can reduce and still have a great time. Thank you Cynthia Nunez from Walter Zimmerman Elementary for the great idea!

Reuse

You can also use everyday items that would be thrown away for ornaments or other activities. One idea would be to save the sleeves on coffee cups and reuse them in an ornament for a tree or as a personalized sleeve that mom, dad, aunt, or uncle could use over and over again. The cups can also be saved to make a tree or candle holder that students could put together for a decoration for the holidays.

Make an acrostic poem with RECYCLE that would then be turned into a New Year's Day card that would encourage the card-receiver to recycle all-year 'round. A simple slogan on the card could be "Ring in the New Year with Recycling!"

Recycle

Have a few tubs in the room to help kids learn how to sort different recyclable items. The tubs can be labeled paper, aluminum cans, and plastic bottles. These tubs could be as simple as the boxes that hold copy paper or as fancy as a free bin donated by your state or local recycling agency. Here in Cathedral City there's an Environmental Conservation department that is funded from the city government and offers its assistance for school and community organizations. Last year, the city donated compact fluorescent light bulbs, pencils, recycled bags, tattoos encouraging recycling, and stickers for our Energy Conservation Night.

Comments

E: Classroom Solutions
DATE: 04/22/2010 12:36:53 PM
Now is a perfect time for our students to learn about reducing their energy usage and ways in which they can become "green" citizens. Here are a few books that I found online and have used in my classroom to make Earth Day a day where we remind ourselv...